Inside Scoop.

You know the air inside your house is dry during the...

January 02, 2000|By Karen Klages.

You know the air inside your house is dry during the winter, but would you believe desert-dry? Honeywell Inc., maker of humidifiers and other heating, ventilation and air control products, pulled together some numbers:

On a 30-degree winter day, with an outdoor relative humidity of 60 percent, your indoor humidity level can drop to a throat-scraping 17 percent if you have your thermostat set for 70 degrees. (Ideally, that indoor humidity level should be 35 to 50 percent.) And on a very cold, 10-degree winter day, the indoor humidity can plummet to a bone-dry 8 percent or less in homes without humidifiers. The furnace is literally baking the air inside your home to a level three times as dry as the Saharas average relative humidity of 25 percent.

Some of the perils of parched air (besides dry skin and throats, static cling and flyaway hair) include creaky floors, wobbly banisters and wood drawers and doors that don't seem to fit right.